Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

The noble Baroness has asked a sensible question but I do not agree with the answer that she has come up with. This gets back to the question of whether this is a private or a public scheme. If it is a public sector scheme, perhaps the Treasury should be doing as the noble Baroness suggests. However, under the Government’s current model, this is a private company and voluntary scheme. If it runs into difficulties, the people who should be sorting it out are those who are responsible for it—namely, the banks and building societies. Under the current model, as I understand it, they will appoint the directors of this body and they must take some responsibility. If the reclaim fund ran into difficulty, I do not see why the banks and building societies could not make an additional payment into the reclaim fund as an advance on payments that they would be due to make in forthcoming years. The poor old Big Lottery Fund would then be starved of funds while this got sorted out, but that would be a logical way of dealing with the matter. The only exception would be where the Treasury had instructed the reclaim fund to spend more money than it wanted. In those circumstances, it might pick up the Bill. All this demonstrates that what looks like a simple scheme is much more complicated than it first appears. Although it will depend to some extent on what the Minister says in this case, the examples that we had in previous amendments do not satisfy me that the Government, in consultation with banks and building societies, which seem to be driving a lot of this, have thought out many of the details of how some of these problems will be dealt with.